Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Playlist for At Home with Rose for Wednesday 25 February, 2009 on Radio23.

My favourite track for today is Whenua by Isle Park. Strange and beautiful.

Thanks heaps to Chelsea from Teacups for sending me tracks for the show. Also to Reuben from Emerald Citeies for Mull Pasha, the new single from their forthcoming release Circa Scaria due out on 6 April.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

It's my non-noise week for my radio show, so a mix of old and new of mixed genre. Okay, Ladyhawke is totally pop, but I love "Paris is Burning". I can't justify it – I just like it.

I'm hoping I can eventually play my show completely live without having to plan ahead, but for now I'm having to do it this way. Been a bit lazy with the links - might add some more in if I have time. I seem to be having a very busy week.

Included are three of my all-time favourite NZ songs - Tall Dwarf's "Nothing's Gonna Happen" (felt like my teenage theme song at the age of 15), The Chills' "Pink Frost" and "Down in Splendour" by Straightjacket Fits. I always did prefer Andrew Brough's voice to Shayne Carter's.

Thursday, February 05, 2009

David called me a witch (I was trying very hard to annoy him at the time, and succeeding). Then he said “I think I offended a woman at work when I called her a witch [pause for effect]… I think she's a fundamentalist christian.”

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

As a preamble to my show tomorrow morning, I want to quote part of a review of PseudoArcana's compilation, The Tone of the Universe (= The Tone of the Earth) on Pitchfork:

“Drone is liturgy. Since its mid-century installation in the repertoire of experimental music, drone has been coded with naked aspirations: people looking to the holy East; people looking to the archaic; people looking into deep space, into the pure machine, into the stranger mind. Drone has always been enamored of the faraway. The sacred, as always, must be imported from there.

“Its devotees are few but fervent. But the faith has always seemed strangely incommunicable: It doesn't seem to get many converts, just initiates and infidels and no commerce between them. Missionary work is a slog. Those who have made stabs at evangelization know the response is usually incredulity rather than hostility. Minimalist classics have been returned to me with a blankness bordering on incomprehension, as if I'd handed out videotapes of television snow and demanded an assessment of character arcs.”

Drone is not to everyone’s taste - that's a given. When I first listened to drone and noise, I found I could only take it in bursts. Sometimes there was some that I just didn't “get” in the least. It's taken a while to get to the stage where I can happily listen to a couple of hours of back-to-back noise and drone. I think that what drone has done for me has helped me find the “music” in the everyday. The sound around us everywhere. The divine noise of life. Listen to the words used in the quote: liturgy, fervent, converts. I went to see the final performance of Birchville Cat Motel in Christchurch and there's such a hush, such a feeling of communion, that you could feel you were in a church. There’s a feeling of reverence at a noise gig. Noise and drone have opened up my aural appreciation, my aural senses. It's helped me to “listen” and it has a meditative quality. Pauline Oliveros uses a term “deep listening” that I rather like.

My playlist is (and will be every week) solely New Zealand. Every other week I'll be playing other NZ music – a mix of genres, but generally away from the mainstream. Radio23 is international, so I want to get some NZ music out there that I'd like people to hear.

I hope it all works according to plan because the station is still in Beta mode and this is a test run for me.

I'm doing a weekly radio show for Radio23 - live tomorrow morning from 7-9am NZ time - called At Home With Rose (of course). NZ noise-drone-ambient. Radio23 is still on test drive. Hope it all goes according to plan!

It's going to be a weekly show. Kinda exciting cos I've never done anything like this before.